


Put Some Dirt On It

by Barkour



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: During Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-20 12:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1509734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the way up the mountain, Anna and Kristoff talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Put Some Dirt On It

The trees thickened, their branches, weighted by ice, knotting together so that passage through this stretch of the woods grew tricky. Sven grumbled and, lowering his head, shouldered through the mess. 

“‘Maybe you should tell the princess to go carefully here,’” Kristoff mimicked. Sven shot him a look and Kristoff rolled his eyes away. “Ugh. Fine. Hey, Anna—”

He turned: he was too late. Her skirts had caught on the longer, low-set branches at the bottom of one of the older trees, and in the moment of his turning to look back at her the situation rapidly escalated. Anna yelped, jerked back too hard, caught her arm on another branch, swore—and how the heck did _she_ know _that_ word? Kristoff’s ma would have beaten his head in if he ever said anything like that. She wrenched her arm free, again overcorrecting, and the branch swung back, slapping her across the face; and Anna just hauled off and punched the tree.

“Ow,” she said, and she doubled over, clutching her hand to her chest. 

Sven whickered. If he weren’t half-trapped in the maze of branches himself, he would have gone over and nuzzled at her. Between two trees, one near death from the sudden relapse of winter, the other leaning dangerously sideways, Kristoff hesitated. The princess stuck her mittened hand in her mouth.

Olaf had no such troubles, borne out of either bulk or emotional ineptitude. He came trundling back, all mournful, matronly clucks, and “oh, dear, oh, dear”s as he patted Anna’s arms. Kristoff squared his shoulders. 

“Haven’t you ever been outside before?” Kristoff demanded. “Like, in your life?”

Anna glared up at him. Olaf glared, too. Kristoff didn’t have to look at Sven to know Sven was eyeballing him. Whatever. He had several absolutely valid reasons to ask that question.

“I’ve been outside before,” Anna said, around her mitten. It came out sounding something like aywauhbuggabluh. She spat her hand out and said it again, more indignant, then added, without needing to, “Just not in—a while.”

“It shows,” Kristoff said. He scratched at his arm, up near the shoulder.

Anna was picking at the mitten, trying to peel it off with her other hand just as thoroughly mitten-ed up. She was frowning, too, with her nose pushed up and her eyes sort of crossing. At least the branch hadn’t cut her cheek when it lashed her. Kristoff looked away from her face. A tree was there; that wasn’t giving him a dirty look.

He cleared his throat and began fumbling with his mittens. “Uh. You could—Why don’t you let me look at it?”

“I can take my own mittens off,” Anna grumbled. As Kristoff crouched in front of her, she bit the end of the mitten and yanked it off her hand with her teeth.

“Oh, I wish I had teeth,” Olaf sighed, “real teeth, for chomping and chewing and just tearing things apart.”

“Come on,” Kristoff said, “just let me see your hand.” He stuck his own bare hand out. 

“You can see mine!” Olaf jutted a stick out at Kristoff, and Kristoff recoiled.

“Not you—you didn’t punch a tree. You’re not hurt.”

“Neither am I,” Anna protested, and Olaf, withdrawing, said sadly, “I’m hurting _inside_.”

“I’m not hurt,” Anna said, more firmly. She was cradling her hand again, close to her breast. The mitten dangled from her wrist, tied to its fellow by a long, decorated felt cord. 

“Just let me look at it—”

“I’m _fine_ , I’m not going to give you my _hand_ —”

“You gave that other guy you just met your hand,” Kristoff said dryly.

Anna swelled. “That other guy is my _fiancé_ and he is a _beautiful prince_ with _beautiful hands_ —” She gestured violently. Good thing Kristoff wasn’t a tree, or his guitar that she broke on a wolf’s head.

He caught her hand as she cut it sharply through the air, and Anna startled. Her pale eyes were wide, her lashes dark, like cobwebs blackened by soot from a winter fire in a closed room. It occurred to Kristoff that maybe that was kind of a weird thing to think, given he didn’t even like her as a person and he hadn’t even known her for three days yet. Her face was very close to his. Her fingers were cold against the side of his hand. He wanted, stupidly, to push her back and stand up and tell her she could take care of her own hand and also he was leaving. The back of his neck hurt. If his ma were here, she’d give him grief about having a tongue like a rock that had forgotten it could roll down a hill.

The surprise around Anna’s eyes began to fade. Her long, smooth fingers were curling, not around his hand, but into something like a fist.

Kristoff ducked his head. If she punched the top of his head, she’d only hurt her knuckles more and Kristoff not at all: he was hard-headed, that’s what Ma said. Sven said that too.

There was a split in her skin, between the knuckles at the base of her first two fingers. Blood was running in a little stream down the gulley between her fingers; that stretch of softer connective skin. He didn’t have any of Grandpappy’s healing sense, not the magic kind, but even Kristoff could tell she’d have a bruise there later, a mottled one around the cut.

“There. Look,” he said. “You hurt your hand.” He lifted it so she could see for herself how the skin had broken and how she bled. “You shouldn’t punch trees.”

“I wasn’t punching the tree,” Anna protested. Her fingers tightened around his hand. Her fingernails, three neatly shaped and the other, the nail of her third finger, a ragged edge, dug into his palm. “I was just trying to—”

“Scare it? Beat it up?”

“Shake the branches free,” she snapped.

“Well, for the record,” Kristoff said, “I don’t think hitting it with your fist is maybe the best way to do that.”

She reddened. Her temper rose again. “If you’re just going to, to lecture me and—tell me I’m doing it wrong—” There was something in the way she said that, like she’d grown used to people looking down at her. 

Not that Kristoff cared if anyone looked down on the princess, and as if anyone _would_. She was a princess, after all, rich and royal and beloved. Probably if she farted people fell all over themselves so they could be the first to tell her how delightful it smelled, how much like flowers in spring,  &c, or they’d assure her they were the ones who had dealt it, having smelt it. Her hands were very smooth. She hadn’t worked, not with her hands, and it was particularly dirt-headed of him to think her prince’s hands must be as soft, as beautiful, not at all like Kristoff’s big, rough hands, callused and scarred and ugly.

“I’m going to clean it,” he said abruptly, and he grabbed up a handful of snow with his mittened hand. He didn’t want to think about her hands. Her little finger was very slightly crooked, turned at an angle by an old break that had mended wrong. He didn’t want to think about that, either. Kristoff mashed the snow onto her hand.

Anna jumped and tried to pull her hand back. He clasped her wrist. 

“That hurt!”

Kristoff hunched his shoulders. “Sorry.” Hesitatingly, he patted her hand, trying to be gentle as he rubbed the snow down her knuckles, over the small gash that sat between them.

Ma’s hands were gentle, as smooth as a stone polished by a river’s current. Grandpappy’s hands were even smoother. The trolls were the first of the North Mountain’s children, borne from the oldest rocks deep in the earth, the ones that had never seen sunlight. They were hardy, strong, not at all like people who were the children of the place where the rising sun and the great river met in the morning. People were soft, but softness was not the same thing as gentleness, and Ma was gentle where Kristoff was not. She’d know how to rub the snow into Anna’s hand with the side of her thumb, so very kindly Anna wouldn’t notice that it hurt.

That crooked little finger fluttered against his wrist. The bones in her wrist were finely set. Her jaw was set, too, but that wasn’t fine. She had a tiny mark on the back of her hand, a shiny scar that ran from the base of her thumb nearly to the inside of her wrist: a burn, an old one. He brushed the snow from her knuckles. It came away red and wet, half-melted; her hand was white with cold. The blood was welling again, slowly rising from the edges. He held on to her hand as he looked around at the trees. 

“You need to stop jumping before you look,” he said, ignoring the affronted look Anna gave him. “Doing things without thinking about them first. You’re going to get yourself hurt if you keep doing that, you know.”

“I think about things before I do them,” she said. “Maybe not as much as Elsa would—” And she flushed again. There was something in that, too, how she talked about her big sister—the queen—in that sort of awed way, with an edge turned not at the queen but Anna. Like she thought she wasn’t as good as Elsa, and it wasn’t like Kristoff cared about that either. He didn’t even know the queen. She probably never farted at all, not even a little.

“Well, punching a tree was something you should have thought about,” he said. Still holding on to her hand—she was very cold, and the ends of her fingers were reddening with it—Kristoff twisted and dug into the snow at the base of the near tree, the one Anna had tried to beat up.

“For one,” he said, “if you’re going to start punching things, you have to keep your wrist straight. You’re lucky you didn’t break it.” He’d tested for that when he felt her wrist. “And keep your little finger turned out.”

“How do you know that?” she asked, suspicious. “How many shop clerks have you beat up because they didn’t offer you a—” She did something weird with her free hand that he thought might have been meant as finger quotes. The mitten got in the way; it looked as if it were nodding. “‘Fair price’?”

“Just once,” Kristoff said, fumbling along the trunk in the snow, “and he was a lying, thieving crook who was selling river stones as precious stones to tourists from the Sun Kingdom. Also he said Sven smelled bad.”

Sven snorted at the memory.

“Oh, Ugly Sven,” Olaf said to Kristoff, “I don’t think you smell bad!”

“Your nose is a carrot,” Kristoff said witheringly.

“And it’s lovely,” Anna, smiling, said to Olaf. Her cheeks dimpled when she smiled like that. She’d little damp spots shining in her red hair, where snow had melted.

Kristoff pulled his hand, closed, out of the snow. Clumps of dirt stuck out from the side of his mitten. He dumped the moss on his knee, and Anna turned from Olaf. Her eyebrows knit.

“What’s that for?” she asked, but if she was still mad at Kristoff, it didn’t show. If anything, she looked curious.

He rubbed his thumb along her first knuckle, and Anna snapped her head up. Her eyes were wide again. He busied himself with getting the dirt off the moss and the snow out of it, too.

“You’re still bleeding,” he said. “This’ll help clot the blood so you’ll stop bleeding.” He made to pull his mitten off same as Anna had, with teeth. 

But she caught his hand, as he’d caught her hand, and she got her own mittened fingers, shaped like a hook, into the wrist of his mitten. She pulled on it, and he pulled his hand back, fingers pressed together, thumb carefully arched. The mitten stuck a moment on the wide corner of his hand, and then it popped free to hang from his wrist. The cold air was sharp against his skin. Anna looked up at him—a few loose strands from that white streak in her hair sticking out from her head—and her cheek, just the right one, dimpled a little.

His ears were hot, in that way your skin got hot when it was so cold out. He’d lost his ear muffler, the good fur one Auntie Black Pond Silt had made for him, when he’d lost the sled. Now his ears stung, bit raw by the frost. 

“Thanks,” Kristoff said.

Picking the dirt out was easier with fingers. He bent his head to that.

“So,” Anna said after a moment. She was looking away too, he found when he glanced up: looking at the pile of snow he’d made, digging it up from around the tree. “Where did you learn all of this stuff?”

He shrugged and said, “My family.” He left it at that. Most people didn’t care for trolls, when they even believed in them. The villages around the North Mountain especially hated trolls, since the trolls were why the villages couldn’t mine the mountain for precious stones to sell to the Sun Kingdom or coal for their homes in winter. Anna had done okay with Olaf—and so far as Kristoff was concerned, Olaf was way weirder than Kristoff’s family—but a talking snowman her magician sister made wasn’t the same thing as his ma or his cousins or Grandpappy. 

“Are they all as mean as you?”

Kristoff looked up to glare—yeah, he could do that just as good as Anna could—but her voice had gone up at the end of it; she was biting the side of her lip; her face was turned so he was looking at the side of her nose. Startled, he thought: she was trying to tease him. Like they were friends, or like she wasn’t sure of it. She probably had tons of friends. He didn’t know why she’d want to be friends with him, when he wasn’t even nice to her. People did that, he thought, tried to pretend they were friends with each other when really they were just trying to make a better deal than the other guy. That was what Anna had wanted, wasn’t it, a good deal; she’d paid him to take her to the mountain. 

She was peeking sidelong at him. Her hand was easy in his grip, her wrist relaxed.

“Nah,” Kristoff said, “it’s just me that’s the mean one. Isn’t that right, Sven?” He began packing the moss, mostly cleaned out, against the back of her hand. He wished they had bandages, but those were as lost as his muffler and the sled. “‘It sure is, Kristoff. You’re as mean as an old bear.’”

Anna’s hand tightened and she laughed. This was the first time she’d laughed before him, and he was as startled by the sound of it as by the thought that she meant to make friends with him. He supposed if he’d ever cared to wonder how a princess would laugh, he’d conclude she’d laugh musically. Anna’s laugh was gasp-y and she snorted a little at the end of it, like Sven did when he got into a whickering mood.

“What?” Kristoff scowled. “I’m not that mean—”

“No,” Anna said, “it’s not that—but you really are mean—can I tell you something?” She chattered like that, always in a rush, as if she thought he’d stop her from talking; as if he could.

“Are you going to even if I say no?” 

She was; she did. Anna wiggled her fingers.

“Sometimes,” she said, “after Elsa—when she … went away, before, not like this time but just sitting in her room all the time or studying with her tutor or— Anyway, there wasn’t anyone for me to talk to, so I’d go sit in the gallery and have conversations with the paintings. I’d make up voices for them and pretend like everyone in the paintings was in the room with me, and that they were all my—” She cut herself off, but he heard the word she didn’t say.

“I just thought it was funny,” she said instead, “that you do the same thing.”

He changed his grip on her hand, so the heel of his palm held the moss trapped against her knuckles. Fumbling with his coat—he had to have a scrap of something in it that he could use—Kristoff said, “I don’t make up voices for Sven.” He had a ragged strip of canvas in the pocket at his hip. “You have friends, don’t you—you live in that big castle, you probably have hundreds of servants waiting on you all day so you don’t have to do anything.”

Anna was quiet then, as he tied the rag around her hand. Then she sighed, a deep sigh that left her shoulders bowed and her eyes focused on something or someone far away.

“I have my sister,” she said, in that wondering, knife-like voice. Then she brightened, her dimples showing again. “And I have Hans.”

Kristoff rolled his eyes. Her dear friend Hans, last name: _of the Southern Isles_. At least Kristoff wasn’t so block-headed that he could fall in love with someone he’d just met. It was a miracle he wasn’t still tempted to dump Anna off at one of the low-mountain villages and let one of them take her to the queen who was killing his second quarter profit margin.

“Of course,” he said, finishing off the knot. “You have _Hans_.”

“And I have Olaf,” Anna said.

“Oh, that’s me,” Olaf said, “oh, I’m so happy to be included—thank you—”

“And Sven,” she continued.

“Sven’s my friend,” Kristoff argued, “not your friend—”

“He’s my friend too,” Olaf said, hugging Sven’s leg. “My best friend—haha, oh, Handsome Sven, no, no nose kisses!”

“And you,” she said to Kristoff.

He was still holding her hand. Kristoff dropped it.

“I’m not your friend,” he said. “You don’t even know me—you don’t know anything about me—”

Anna slipped her mitten back on and said, “I know that you’re a grouchy bear.”

He stood up, leaving her in the snow. His hands ached with the cold. He yanked his mittens back on.

“And I don’t know _you_ ,” Kristoff said. “Except that you’re too trusting, and you’re marrying someone you don’t even know, and your sister’s trying to freeze us all to death—”

“She isn’t,” Anna protested. She struggled to stand; her skirts tangled around her knees. “I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. She’s probably—scared and alone, and she just needs someone she can trust. A friend.” She touched her chest, over her heart. “Like me. You know what that’s like, don’t you?”

She was looking at him so earnestly, her blue eyes huge, her hair streaked wet with snow and there with white, like the stripe of a skunk. Her right hand was at her heart, and her left hand— Her left hand was stretched out, just a fraction. Anna, who talked to paintings and lived in her sister’s shadow, he figured: she wasn’t his friend. He didn’t want her to be his friend; he didn’t want to be her friend. The white woven through her hair was like a silvery fish darting through a mountain river, there under the ice. Kristoff didn’t take her hand again.

“We should try to go a little farther before we set up camp tonight,” Kristoff said. “It doesn’t look like it’s going to storm again today, but we want to be settled before the sun sets.” 

They had a few hours before night, so even with the deeper snows on the mountain they could still make decent progress. The queen might have cursed them with snow in summer, but even a queen couldn’t change the long hours of the season. Up by Sven, Kristoff ducked his head to avoid several sharp icicles hanging from a low-set branch. He wouldn’t be able to afford a new sled this year if the ice held.

Anna caught up to him after a few strides. She’d hitched her woolen skirt up. Her boots showed from under her raised hem as they punched through the frost lain on top of the snow. She was angry with him again, he thought; that was why she forged on ahead of him. His tongue itched. He rubbed at his nose. Here he was plodding along after her, wanting—he didn’t know why—to call out to her. What would he say? It wasn’t his fault she used to talk with paintings. He hadn’t asked her to ask him to escort her up the mountain.

“Oh, Sven,” Olaf said, shaking his head. He patted Kristoff’s knee. “You just don’t really understand people, do you?”

“I understand people fine,” Kristoff said. He understood them perfectly. 

Anna was a princess and a person too, and she’d said that thing about having Kristoff for a friend but it wasn’t like when this whole thing was over she was going to want to see him again. The entire reason he was out here with her was because she’d wanted him to help her find her sister, and when she’d found her sister, the queen and the princess would go back to the harbor capital, and Anna would marry perfect Hans-of-the-Southern-Isles, and that was _fine_. Kristoff had his own life. He had his family and he had Sven and he didn’t have a sled anymore, but he’d just have to save up for a new one. He didn’t need a friend. He didn’t need to be out here on the North Mountain, following after some girl with red hair who always jumped without looking to see if she had somewhere to land. Kristoff didn’t jump; he kept his feet firmly and safely on the ground, right where they were supposed to stay.

His face hurt; his ears too. He had dirt and moss stuck under his nails. If they were friends, he thought; but they weren’t. 

“Don’t walk so fast,” he said. “We’ll have to stop sooner if you get tired early.”

“Why are you worried about me?” Anna yelled back. “I thought you weren’t my friend!”

“I’m not worried about you,” he shouted. “I just don’t want to set up camp early and lose daylight.”

“Well, that is just _so nice_ of you! I’m _so glad_ you care _so much_ about finding my sister!” She was stomping faster now, her cloak shuddering as it passed over the holes she left in the snow. She was talking to herself then. “Hans wanted to come with me. _He_ wanted to help me find Elsa.”

Kristoff shoved on through the snow. He was nearly even with her. 

“So why didn’t you ask him instead of me?”

“I couldn’t make Hans help me,” Anna said. “Not when none of this is his fault.”

“So, what,” Kristoff said, “it’s my fault?”

“It’s mine!” Anna threw her arms out. “It’s my fault, and I have to fix it, so I’m fixing it. Hans—he’s already done so much for me—”

“You just _met_ him!”

“He’s _kind_ ,” Anna said furiously, “and he’s _beautiful_ and he held my hand and he asked me to dance and, and maybe it was only a few hours, but I knew as soon as I saw him that I was in _love_ and when you love someone you don’t ask them to do things for you.”

Kristoff had held her hand. He muttered, “He should have followed you. Then you could’ve left _me_ out of this.”

Anna dropped her hands. “You don’t want to help me?”

“No,” Kristoff said, “I _don’t_ ,” and then _he_ brushed past _her_. He’d thought it would be more satisfying.

This was always what happened when you helped someone. He’d made that mistake when he was a kid, trying to help the ice cutters, and again a few years later when he went down to one of the villages at the foot of the mountain. Why had he gone down then? To see a face like his own face, he supposed, but the soft, human people there had hated trolls and talked of chasing them away from the North Mountain, mother to the stone people, so he’d left again. Well, he wouldn’t make that mistake again after this. Maybe love meant you could ask someone to do something for you, but the way Kristoff figured it, if Hans loved Anna he should have gone with her anyway instead of kicking his heels up in front of a nice, big, cozy fire and waiting for her to come back to him. Kristoff wished he hadn’t even gone into that general store; he wished he hadn’t seen her and she hadn’t seen him. He should have turned her down back at the barn. He wished she hadn’t laughed in front of him.

They walked on, all of them, in silence for a time, a long time. Even Olaf was quiet, and that had to have been biting at him. The silence was certainly biting at Kristoff. He glanced at Anna. Her head was up, her chin jutting out, but she looked, he thought, very alone; alone like a girl who made up voices for the people in paintings so she had someone to talk to. He looked away from her.

Ice hung from the trees. Frost whitened his breath. Gruffly he said, “I’m sorry.” 

Anna pressed her hands together. She rubbed at the hand she’d hurt.

“Thank you for apologizing,” she said.

The wintry quiet closed around them again. Her footsteps crunched; his crushed.

“You’re supposed to apologize now too,” he said.

She looked at him askance. “For what?”

“Causing trouble.”

“I already said I was sorry for that,” she said, meaning this June snow. She was frowning. “What else did I do?”

He didn’t know how to say it in words. He wasn’t sure how to even think of it. It was Anna walking beside him; that was the trouble.

“Never mind,” Kristoff said. He didn’t want to think about it. He wouldn’t think about it. Whatever it was, he didn’t want it; he was pushing it away; it was gone. But Anna was still there, walking just a step behind and beside him, her red hair sticking out from the brim of her fur-trimmed pink hat. He was tall enough that when he looked down at her, all he saw of her eyes was a dark suggestion of eyelash; the line of her turned-out and turned-up nose was clearer. She was still massaging the back of her hand.

Kristoff cleared his throat. “How’s your hand? Is it okay?”

She tipped her head back. Her eyes showed; her eyelashes were now more than just a suggestion. Then she dropped her gaze again, and the fractional warmth that had started up on his nape gave way to the chill slipping down his collar.

“It hurts a little,” she said honestly. “Thank you for asking. And for—” She held her hand out in front of her and flapped it. The little decorative ball tied to the wrist bounced.

Kristoff weighed the words in his mouth before saying them. When he did say them, they came out awkwardly, poorly shaped. 

“You’re welcome. Just don’t punch anything else.”

“If I do,” Anna said, “I’ll keep my wrist straight,” and she dimpled again. 

He liked her laugh more than her smile, but he didn’t mind it when she smiled. Not that he wanted her to smile. But it was nice, he thought, when she did. Shyly, Kristoff smiled too, and Anna—the end of her flipped nose red from the wind—brightened so much that he had to look away again. The sun was in his face anyway, as it began to slide away behind the side of the mountain, and the sunlight had hurt his eyes. His cheeks felt hot, his mouth dry. Kristoff turned his face from the sun, and Anna where she walked between Kristoff and the west, and into the cooling wind as it blew across the snow. His heart was clenching, and he didn’t know what it meant when his heart did something like that. 

They’d be there soon, and then it would be done; he wouldn’t have to see her again. Good. He thought it again, harder: Good. He meant it, too. He did. He was tired of the not knowing why it was he liked it when she smiled. Everything would be easier when she was gone, and that was precisely what he wanted. She’d have her sister, and she’d have her Hans, and Kristoff would have his own peaceful life back. So what if he never saw her again? That, he thought, was just fine with him. It was what he’d expected from the start. Besides, he thought, he barely knew her. Maybe Anna could fall madly in love with a man she just met, but Kristoff knew better than to call someone he’d only met the other day a friend.

Sven was walking next to Kristoff, their paces matched as they were always matched. His eye was dark and knowing, but Kristoff held his tongue. Ma always said Kristoff needed to know when to keep the peace, so here: he was keeping it. He wouldn’t give Sven the satisfaction of saying it out loud. He was tired of talking anyway, and they still had a ways to go. Kristoff ducked his head and kept walking through the wind.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the issues I had with _Frozen_ is that it didn't have enough "breathers," moments for characters to just talk about things other than their Motivations or What They Were Going To Do. So I guess that's what this is for, haha.


End file.
